Category Archives: Liberal religion

Moses George Thomas, minister-at-large

This is the second in a two-part series on the ministers of Centre Church, New Bedford. Part One.

Rev. Jonathan Brown, of Naples, N.Y., was the second minister of Centre Church, from 1845-1848. Following his unsuccessful ministry, the congregation “voted not to employ any but Unitarian ministers.” (13) They then called Rev. Moses George Thomas as their next minister.

Moses George Thomas was born on January 19, 1805, in Sterling, Mass. He was graduated from Brown University in 1825, and from there went directly to the divinity school at Harvard. (14) While he was still a student at Harvard Divinity School, the American Unitarian Association (AUA) hired him to travel through the Western frontier, to find out where the AUA might fruitful ground in which to plant new Unitarian churches. From 1826-1827, Thomas traveled some 4,000 miles on horseback, through Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, going as far west as St. Louis. (15)

Following his graduation from divinity school in 1828, Thomas served as minister of the Unitarian church in Concord, N.H., from 1829 to 1844. He was ordained there, and he was the first Unitarian minister settled in that city. He laid the cornerstone of the first Unitarian church building, and gave the sermon at the dedication of that building. In his early years at Concord, N.H., he became good friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had supplied the pulpit there before Thomas arrived. (16) While serving in Concord, N.H., Thomas officiated at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first marriage, to Ellen Tucker. (17) The next year, 1830, Thomas himself was married, to Mary Jane Kent. Thomas’s time in Concord was later reported to be perhaps the happiest time of his life. (18)

Thomas was settled at the Broadway Church in South Boston in 1845, soon after the church was organized; here again, Thomas was the founding minister of the church. This congregation never owned its own building, but met in rented space; it seems to have dissolved by about 1853. (19)

After leaving the Broadway Church, Thomas came to New Bedford and was installed as the minister of Centre Church in 1848. Continue reading →

Rev. Charles Morgridge, a not-quite-Unitarian

Charles Morgridge was born in Litchfield, Maine, ion August 28, 1791. He attended Bowdoin College, from about 1817 to about 1820. (1) I have been able to find out nothing about his early life.

He entered Bowdoin College as a sophomore when he was 26 (i.e., probably in 1817), and probably was graduated in 1820 or 1821. At some point, he decided to become a minister in the Christian Connection (or Christian Connexion) denomination. He was ordained as a Christian Connection minister in Fairhaven on September 14, 1821; (2) and thereafter he led a peripatetic life, moving frequently from church to church.

While at Fairhaven, his salary as a minister was inadequate, so he also taught in the Fairhaven high school. After spending a year or two at the Fairhaven church, he went to serve for a year as a minister in Portsmouth, N. H., then perhaps two years as a minister in Eastport, Maine, and then he served at the Christian Connection Church on Summer Street in Boston. He left Boston and was settled at the North Christian Church (later called First Christian Church) in New Bedford from 1827. He left New Bedford in 1831 to become the minister of the Christian Connection church in Portland, Maine, at that time the largest church in that denomination, and stayed there until 1834. He returned to New Bedford to serve North Christian Church in New Bedford from 1834 to 1841. (3) Here’s a first-hand account by one Eleazar Sherman of what North Christian Church was like in 1834:

“This house will seat about fifteen hundred people. — In the time of the great reformation in 1834, this house was opened every day for more than three months, day and night; scores of weeping souls came out of their pews for prayer, and bowed before the Lord and the gazing multitude; and the prayers of God’s people prevailed; the angel of the everlasting covenant presented the humble prayer of the penitent before his Father; the angel of mercy descended and pat the cup of salvation to the lips of the dying sinner, and bade him drink the wine of the kingdom and live forever. Oh, what shouts of praise flowed from young converts, whose hearts were filled with hearenly love at this day of God’s power. Continue reading →

A peace hymn that’s not so bad

OK, here’s a peace hymn that’s not too horrible.

Words: I found the words on Mudcat, made about three changes to make them gender-neutral, and smoothed out one or two rough transitions. I have been unable to track down who wrote these words, so I’m attributing them to “Unknown”; this is not great poetry, but it’s no worse than many of the hymns we sing on a regular basis.

Music: Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” I’m providing sheet music for the hymn in two forms: (1) melody and words only, on a 5-1/2 by 8-1/2 inch sheet suitable for inserting into a typical order of service; and (2) full score for choir, SATB on a full 8-1/2 by 11 inch sheet.

Earlier entry on a peace song.

A peace song I actually like

After all my whining and complaining last week about why I hate peace songs, I now have a peace song that I quite like. This past Saturday, I went to a music conference and attended a workshop on children’s choirs led by Joanne Hammil, and she taught us a very simple, but effective, peace song. The words are a straightforward prayer or meditation: “May I be an instrument of peace.” The melody works as either a meditative chant to be sung over and over again, or as a round with up to eight voices. We sang it in our church choir on Monday, and I’ve been singing it at home, and I haven’t gotten sick of it yet. So here it is:

Sheet music for “May I Be an Instrument of Peace”
MIDI file of “May I Be an Instrument of Peace”

(Please remember that MIDI files sound dreadful, and you should not judge this song by that file — the MIDI file is just there if you want to learn the melody of the song.)

“And only four kids came…”

Maggi Peirce gave a talk today at the church about how she and some others started a folk music coffee house in New Bedford in 1967. They had programming every Friday and Saturday evening, to provide a safe place for teenagers during that era of youth unrest. After starting off with a bang in May, 1967, they began having increasing difficulty finding adult volunteers, until things reached a crisis point in July. Here’s how Maggi told the story this afternoon:

“Every time that I would ask for people to help, they sort of faded like snow off a ditch. And then there was one famous night where I had to take care of Friday night. And I turned up, and wonderful Joe Cardoza. We loved Joe Cardoza. He always did the door. He was our doorkeeper, and he was from Pilgrim Church [the UCC church here in New Bedford]. The salt of the earth! And there was another woman there called Florrie; and then Ellen; they worked in the kitchen.

“And when this happened, I arrived on the Friday, but nobody else did. Joe was on the door. And there wasn’t even any coffee that night. And only four kids came. And one of them was P—— and he was from Fairhaven. And he said to me — he had a guitar with him; he didn’t play very well [laughter] — and he said, ‘Is nothing happening tonight?’

“And I said, ‘There is always something happening at Tryworks.’

“And he looked at me, and he said, ‘You know, Maggi, this is sort of typical of New Bedford. Everything starts with a big article in the newspaper, and a big hoopla.’ He said, ‘Remember that first night in May, when we opened?’ And this was about July [1967]. He said, ‘Everybody starts with a terrific hope, and everybody’s going to help, and then it all fizzles out within six weeks.’

“And I said, ‘P——, I promise you. Tryworks will not fizzle out in six weeks.’  ”

Well, to make a long story short, Maggi kept that promise. Tryworks coffee house did not fizzle out in six weeks. Maggi became the first director of Tryworks coffeehouse and ran it for twenty years. After she stepped down, it continued for another fifteen years, and when it finally closed for good in 2003 it was the longest-running folk music coffee house in the United States. More importantly, in those thirty-five years Tryworks made a huge impact on the lives of hundreds of young people.

I guess the moral of the story is this: If only four kids show up for your youth program, don’t give up.

Hosea Ballou in New Bedford

I’ve been tracing out the history of Universalist preaching in New Bedford, and finally tracked down the date when Hosea Ballou, the greatest of the early Universalist preachers, visited here — it’s in the second volume of Thomas Whittemore’s sprawling 1854/5 biography of Ballou. Ballou did a tour of the region, preaching at New Bedford, Fairhaven, Mattapoisett (then part of Rochester), Acushnet and Long Plains (then parts of Fairhaven).

Whittemore includes an anecdote of one of Ballou’s encounters with more orthodox clergy. It is such a classic story that I have included it in its entirety, along with the entire story of Ballou’s preaching tour in this area. (I’ve added a few numbered footnotes; Whittemore’s own footnote is marked with an asterisk.)

———

[p. 101] “In May, 1820, he [Ballou] made a journey to New Bedford, at the call of a few friends there, and preached the word of the Lord, as he understood it, at a private house, [1] there being, as he said, ‘no meeting-house in the town whose owners were willing to have the doctrine of God’s universal, impartial, unchangeable goodness preached within its consecrated walls.’ Thence he crossed the river to Fairhaven, where he addressed an assembly in the academy, and also at the head of the river, so called, in the meeting-house formerly occupied by the memorable Dr. West. [2] In the precinct called Mattapoiset, in the town of Rochester, he was invited to preach, by a physician, who was a large owner in the meeting-house. The house was opened by proper authority; but when Mr. B. came to the door, he was confronted by the settled pastor, Rev. Lemuel Le Baron, who forbid his going into the house. Mr. Ballou was very sorry to wound the feelings of the gentleman; but the house had been opened by proper authority, and there was no good reason why the people who had assembled should be disappointed. The principal reason assigned by Mr. Le Baron for his opposition was, that Mr. Ballou was a Universalist, and that Universalism was subversive of Christianity. Mr. B. invited the clergyman to go in with him, and hear what he had to deliver, and then he [p. 102] could the better judge whether the doctrine preached was the truth or not. But Mr. Le Baron refused to do this, and insisted that he had a right to control the pulpit, and to say who should preach in it. Mr. B. told him that the gentlemen who had given their consent for him to preach in the house were of respectable standing, and proprietors of the house; and, if they had violated his privileges, they must be accountable. He further added, that, however Mr. Le Baron might think it his duty to forbid his preaching, he himself could not see how a man who did not own the house could prevent those from the free use of it who did own it, when they desired to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. [3] Mr. B. accordingly passed in, and ‘a goodly number (said he) attended to the word.’ * He preached again in the same place in the evening. Before leaving the place, he addressed Mr. Le Baron a long letter, in which he called on him to show wherein Universalism was subversive of Christianity. Mr. B. quoted many passages from the Scriptures, and then wished his antagonist to show either that these passages did not prove Universalism, or else show how they were subversive of Christianity. This being done, Mr. B. proceeded to a meetinghouse at Long Plains, at the upper part of Fairhaven, where he preached, after which he returned home.”

Footnotes:

* “On Mr. Le Baron being told that Mr. Ballou was going to preach in the house, he said to one of his friends, ‘Had I not better go into the house, and be sacrificed at the foot of the pulpit-stairs?’ On the remark being repeated to Mr. Ballou, he asked, ‘Who did the poor man think was going to harm him?'”

[1] According to the 1869 History of Churches in New Bedford, this “private house” was Dudley Davenport’s carpenter’s shop.

[2] Dr. Samuel West was the liberal minister of the congregation which in 1795 moved to the growing Bedford Precinct, later New Bedford; that congregation became First Congregational Society of New Bedford (Unitarian), now First Unitarian Church in New Bedford.

[3] The argument between Ballou and Le Baron turns on a touchy point. In 1820, most Massachusetts churches were composed of two somewhat separate organizations, the church and the society. The division of responsibilities was something like this: the church, controlled by the minister and the deacons, was the arbiter of who would be admitted as a full church member, such admission possibly including doctrinal tests; — the society, controlled by the proprietors (that is, those who provided the funding to build and maintain the meetinghouse), owned the building and most of the furnishings. Thus both Ballou and Le Baron had compelling arguemnts — Ballou arguing that the proprietors had the right to decide who got access to the building; Le Baron arguing that Ballou would injure the doctrinal purity of the church.

Reference: Life of Rev. Hosea Ballou: With Accounts of His Writings, and Biographical Sketches of His Seniors and Contemporaries in the Universalist Ministry by Thomas Whittemore, Boston: James M. Usher, 1854, vol II., pp. 101-102.

Singable hymns

An Anonymous Person was explaining to me why she is not attracted to the worship services at our church. Among other reasons, Anonymous Person said that the hymns that are hard to sing. I asked: Hard to sing how? Anonymous Person replied that they were too high. And the more I think about it, the more I think she’s right.

In the current Unitarian Universalist hymnals, the hymn tunes typically fall between middle C and high E-flat (i.e., C4 to Eb5, with male voices transposed down an octave to C3 to Eb4). This is a comfortable range for sopranos, and if transposed down an octave, for tenors as well. But what about those of us who have alto voices, like Anonymous Person, or bass voices, like me?

Let me speak for the bass voices among us. If my voice is fully warmed up, and if I concentrate on technique, I can reach E-flat above middle-C (i.e., Eb4). A trained bass voice should be able to reach that note regularly; but mine is not a well-trained voice, and if my allergies are acting up, or if my voice isn’t warmed up, or if I’ve just finished preaching a draining sermon, I’m lucky to hit middle C (i.e., C4). Even when I can sing that high, the most comfortable and powerful part of my singing voice is well below that, from the B-flat below middle C down to the G below low C (i.e., from Bb3 down to G2).

Thus today at church, even though I wasn’t preaching, my allergies were acting up, — so when we sang hymn #114 to the tune of St. Gertrude in the key of E-flat, I had to drop out on those high D and high E-flat notes. It would be great if I could sing the bass part to #114, which is comfortably pitched for my voice and is lots of fun to sing, — but I’m not a strong enough singer to sing it on my own, and hardly anyone sings in four-part harmony any more; sometimes I can follow the bass line on the piano or organ, but today our music director was improvising the accompaniment to #114 which meant I could not follow the bass voice line on the piano. So I sang the soprano’s melody line down an octave, dropped out on the high notes, and didn’t have much fun singing.

While I was struggling my way through hymn #114, it occurred to me that the way we sing hymns is the result of institutional inertia rather than good musicianship. A hundred years ago, our hymns were all written and pitched to be sung with four voices:– sopranos took the melody, and altos, tenors, and basses sang harmony parts. Today, not many congregations can sing in four-part harmony confidently. What usually happens is that all of us try to sing the melody part, which is pitched for soprano voices — yet only about one fourth of us have soprano voices. Most tenors can adjust pretty well by singing the melody part down an octave, but that still leaves half of us, the altos and the basses, unable to sing any of the hymns comfortably.

Even if you’re an alto or bass who can sing four-part harmony confidently, you’re still out of luck much of the time. The new Unitarian Universalist hymnal supplement, Singing the Journey, doesn’t have four-part vocal arrangements;– and perhaps a third of the hymns in the older Singing the Living Tradition lack four-part vocal arrangements.

I can understand why we’d drop four-part vocal arrangements (so few people can sing them), but if we’re dropping four-part singing, then why is every hymn written as if only sopranos are going to sing the melody? The two interlocking answers to this question are: (1) institutional inertia, i.e., “we do it this way because we’ve always done it this way”; and (2) poor musicianship, i.e., the arrangers and editors of hymns haven’t replaced four-part singing with a musically sound alternative.

Now some churches get past this problem by using over-amplified music. If the amplified praise band drowns out your voice, it doesn’t matter if you sing the notes or not, because no one’s going to hear you (you won’t even hear yourself). This is a sociologically astute solution, because most of the population is accustomed to a relatively passive consumption of over-amplified music. However, if you believe that congregations are not passive consumers but active participants in worship, over-amplified praise bands are a poor solution indeed.

I don’t have the ultimate solution to this problem. But here’s one short-term solution: ask the accompanist to transpose the key of all hymns down somewhat. I served in one church where there was an astute music director who did just this — he had a good sense of the average voice, and pitched the hymns downward accordingly. It would also make sense to occasionally choose hymns with a narrower range * — the narrower the range, the more likely it will be that average voices can sing them successfully.

What are your solutions to this problem? How can we help people with average voices, and no musical training, have fun singing in church?

* Examples of hymns with narrower ranges (less than an octave), and good keys to pitch them in:
#30 “Over My Head” — range of a major third — transpose down to key of F
#140 “Hail the Glorious Golden City” (tune: Hyfrodol; hymns 166 & 207 also use this tune) — range of a major sixth — transpose down to key of E
#131 “Love Will Guide Us” — range of a major sixth — does not need to be transposed for average voices

Choose one for UUA president:
Hallman | Morales

If I’ve got my facts right, it’s now too late to nominate another candidate for the presidency of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA). Oh well. We must choose between the two candidates who have declared themselves: Laurel Hallman, the anointed candidate of the UUA power elite; and Peter Morales, the upstart candidate.

Honestly, I’m not terribly enthusiastic about either candidate. Both candidates are a little too committed to “The UUA Way” of doing religion. What is The UUA Way? The UUA Way is:

  • doing religion like it’s still 1986
  • being obsessed with John Carver’s “Policy Governance” (TM) model for administration
  • placing 1980s second-wave feminism at theological center
  • focussing attention on the wealthy White suburbs.

In addition, The UUA Way is dominated by these Baby Boomer behavior patterns:

  • expecting churches to provide goods and services to consumers
  • operating under the assumption that protest is the pinnacle of social justice work
  • always being far too self-absorbed.

I was hoping that a younger candidate (“young” by the standards of The UUA Way means someone under 50) would step forward at the last minute to challenge The UUA Way. Since that hasn’t happened, I’ve finally decided that I’m going to vote for Peter Morales.

I’m going to vote for Morales even though he says he supports John Carver’s Policy Governance (TM) model, a rigid and inflexible model that is poorly matched to membership organizations in which the members (not the Board) set ultimate policy — but at least he uses and seems to understand the phrase “modern management” as applied to non-profits, and that counts for a lot. I’m going to vote for him even though the theological vision he states in his platform is not particularly compelling, nor particularly deep — but at least as someone who spoke Spanish before he spoke English, he seems to have some understanding of theologies that might be congruent with a post-White-hegemony world, and he is willing to talk about reconciliation, and those things count for a lot. Most important to me, Morales seems to really understand that The UUA Way has to undergo rapid change to respond to the vast changes in surrounding society — I don’t think he would change The UUA Way as much as I’d hope to have it changed, but at least we’d see some change in the right direction.

Not that it matters how I vote, or whom I support, because the rumor mill tells me that Morales doesn’t stand a ghost of a chance. Hallman has the money and the influential people behind her, and even Gini Courter, the popular moderator of the UUA, has come out in support of Hallman. So maybe I should just forget the 2009 election.

But I will say this: If you’re a post-Baby-Boomer minister, with good administrative and fundraising skills, and a deep understanding of the societal changes that are rapidly rendering The UUA Way obsolete — I do hope you will start preparing now to run for the 2014 2013 UUA presidential election.